Decision Points

by George W. Bush

  I took my seat in the row ahead of Laura, Barbara, and Jenna. Mother and Dad, Laura’s mom, and my brothers and sister sat nearby. Senator Trent Lott, the chairman of the Inaugural Committee, called Chief Justice William Rehnquist to the podium. I stepped forward with Laura, Barbara, and Jenna. Laura held the Bible, which both Dad and I had used to take the oath. It was open to Isaiah 40:31, “But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”

  I put my left hand on the Bible and raised my right as the ailing chief justice administered the thirty-five-word oath. When I closed with “So help me God,” the cannons boomed a twenty-one-gun salute. I hugged Laura and the girls, stepped back, and soaked in the moment.

  Taking the oath of office for the second time. White House/Susan Sterner

  Then it was time for the speech:

  At this second gathering, our duties are defined not by the words I use, but by the history we have seen together. For a half century, America defended our own freedom by standing watch on distant borders. After the shipwreck of communism came years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical—and then there came a day of fire.

  We have seen our vulnerability—and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny—prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder—violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

  We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. … So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

  After 9/11, I developed a strategy to protect the country that came to be known as the Bush Doctrine: First, make no distinction between the terrorists and the nations that harbor them—and hold both to account. Second, take the fight to the enemy overseas before they can attack us again here at home. Third, confront threats before they fully materialize. And fourth, advance liberty and hope as an alternative to the enemy’s ideology of repression and fear.

  The freedom agenda, as I called the fourth prong, was both idealistic and realistic. It was idealistic in that freedom is a universal gift from Almighty God. It was realistic because freedom is the most practical way to protect our country in the long run. As I said in my Second Inaugural Address, “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.”

  The transformative power of freedom had been proven in places like South Korea, Germany, and Eastern Europe. For me, the most vivid example of freedom’s power was my relationship with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan. Koizumi was one of the first world leaders to offer his support after 9/11. How ironic. Sixty years earlier, my father had fought the Japanese as a Navy pilot. Koizumi’s father had served in the government of Imperial Japan. Now their sons were working together to keep the peace. Something big had changed since World War II: By adopting a Japanese-style democracy, an enemy had become an ally.

  In addition to helping spread democracy, Junichiro Koizumi was a huge Elvis fan and visited Graceland. White House/Eric Draper

  Announcing the freedom agenda was one step. Implementing it was another. In some places, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, we had a unique responsibility to give the people we liberated a chance to build free societies. But these examples were the exception, not the rule. I made clear that the freedom agenda was “not primarily the task of arms.” We would advance freedom by supporting fledgling democratic governments in places like the Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, Georgia, and Ukraine. We would encourage dissidents and democratic reformers suffering under repressive regimes in Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Venezuela. And we would advocate for freedom while maintaining strategic relationships with nations like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Russia, and China.

  Critics charged that the freedom agenda was a way for America to impose our values on others. But freedom is not an American value; it is a universal value. Freedom cannot be imposed; it must be chosen. And when people are given the choice, they choose freedom. At the end of World War II, there were about two dozen democracies in the world. When I took office in January 2001, there were 120.

  Shortly after the 2004 election, I read The Case for Democracy by Natan Sharansky, a dissident who spent nine years in the Soviet gulags. In the book Sharansky describes how he and his fellow prisoners were inspired by hearing leaders like Ronald Reagan speak with moral clarity and call for their freedom.

  In one memorable passage, Sharansky describes a fellow Soviet dissident who likened a tyrannical state to a soldier who constantly points a gun at a prisoner. Eventually, his arms tire and the prisoner escapes. I considered it America’s responsibility to put pressure on the arms of the world’s tyrants. Making that goal a central part of our foreign policy was one of my most consequential decisions as president.

  The great tide of freedom that swept much of the world during the second half of the twentieth century had largely bypassed one region: the Middle East.

  The UN’s Arab Human Development Report, released in 2002, revealed the bleak state of the region: One in three people was illiterate. Unemployment averaged 15 percent. Less than 1 percent of the population had access to the Internet. Maternal mortality rates rivaled those of the least developed countries in the world. Economic output per capita was minuscule.

  The authors of the UN report, a group of respected Arab scholars, attributed the depressing results to three deficits: a deficit in knowledge, a deficit in women’s empowerment, and, most important, a deficit in freedom.

  For most of the Cold War, America’s priority in the Middle East was stability. Our alliances were based on anticommunism, a strategy that made sense at the time. But under the surface, resentment and anger built. Many people turned to radical clerics and mosques as a release. Amid these conditions, terrorists found fertile recruiting ground. Then nineteen terrorists born in the Middle East turned up on planes in the United States. After 9/11, I decided that the stability we had been promoting was a mirage. The focus of the freedom agenda would be the Middle East.

  Six months before I took office, the Camp David peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians fell apart. President Clinton had worked tirelessly to bring together Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Barak made a generous offer to turn over most of the West Bank and Gaza, two territories with majority Palestinian populations that were occupied by Israeli forces and dotted with Israeli settlements. Arafat turned him down.

  Two months later, in September 2000, frustration over the failed peace accord—along with prominent Israeli leader Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount—led to the Second Intifada. Palestinian extremists, many affiliated with the terrorist group Hamas, launched a wave of terrorist attacks against innocent civilians in Israel.

  I didn’t blame President Clinton for the failure at Camp David or the violence that followed. I blamed Arafat. America, Europe, and the United Nations had flooded the Palestinian Territories with development aid. A good portion of it was diverted to Arafat’s bank account. He made the Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest “kings, queens, and despots.” Yet his people remained trapped in poverty, hopelessness, and extremism. For a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, he sure didn’t seem very interested in peace.

  The Israeli people responded to the violent onslaught the way any democracy would: They elected a leader who promised to protect them, Ariel Sharon. I first met Sharon
in 1998, when Laura and I went to Israel with three fellow governors* on a trip sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition.

  The visit was my first to the Holy Land. The most striking memory of the trip came when Ariel Sharon, then a minister in the cabinet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, gave us a helicopter tour of the country. Sharon was a bull of a man, a seventy-year-old former tank commander who had served in all of Israel’s wars. Shortly after the chopper lifted off, he pointed to a patch of ground below. “I fought there,” he said with pride in his gruff voice. When the helicopter turned toward the West Bank, he gestured at an isolated cluster of homes. “I built that settlement,” he said. Sharon subscribed to the Greater Israel policy, which rejected territorial concessions. He knew every inch of the land, and it didn’t sound like he intended to give any of it back.

  “Here our country was only nine miles wide,” Sharon said at another point, referring to the distance between the 1967 borders and the sea. “We have driveways longer than that in Texas,” I later joked. I was struck by Israel’s vulnerability in a hostile neighborhood. Ever since President Harry Truman defied his secretary of state by recognizing Israel in 1948, America had been the Jewish state’s best friend. I came away convinced that we had a responsibility to keep the relationship strong.

  A little over two years later, I called Ariel Sharon from the Oval Office to congratulate him on his election as prime minister. “Maybe, after so many years and wars in which I have participated,” he said, “we will have peace in the region.”

  On June 1, 2001, a suicide bomber killed twenty-one Israelis at the Dolphinarium nightclub in Tel Aviv. Other attacks struck Israeli buses, train stations, and shopping malls. Israeli Defense Forces targeted operations at Hamas strongholds, but innocent Palestinians—including five boys walking to school one day—were killed during the operations.

  I was appalled by the violence and loss of life on both sides. But I refused to accept the moral equivalence between Palestinian suicide attacks on innocent civilians and Israeli military actions intended to protect their people. My views came into sharper focus after 9/11. If the United States had the right to defend itself and prevent future attacks, other democracies had those rights, too.

  I spoke to Yasser Arafat three times in my first year as president. He was courteous, and I was polite in return. But I made clear we expected him to crack down on extremism. “I know these are difficult issues for you and your people,” I told him in February 2001, “but the best way to settle this and start resolving the situation is to stop the violence in the region.”

  In January 2002, the Israeli navy intercepted a ship called the Karine A in the Red Sea. Aboard was an arsenal of deadly weapons. The Israelis believed the ship was headed from Iran to the Palestinian city of Gaza. Arafat sent a letter pleading his innocence. “The smuggling of arms is in total contradiction of the Palestinian Authority’s commitment to the peace process,” he wrote. But we and the Israelis had evidence that disproved the Palestinian leader’s claim. Arafat had lied to me. I never trusted him again. In fact, I never spoke to him again. By the spring of 2002, I had concluded that peace would not be possible with Arafat in power.

  “When will the pig leave Ramallah?” Crown Prince Abdullah** asked me. It was April 25, 2002. Clearly the Saudi ruler was not happy with Ariel Sharon.

  Ever since President Franklin Roosevelt met with Saudi Arabia’s founder, King Abdul Aziz, aboard the USS Quincy in 1945, America’s relationship with the kingdom had been one of our most critical. The Sunni Arab nation sits on a fifth of the world’s oil and has tremendous influence among Muslims as the guardian of the holy mosques at Mecca and Medina.

  I had invited Crown Prince Abdullah—one of Abdul Aziz’s thirty-six sons—to our ranch in Crawford as a way to strengthen our personal relationship. In anticipation of the March 2002 Arab League summit in Beirut, the crown prince showed strong leadership by announcing a new peace plan. Under his vision, Israel would return territory to the Palestinians, who would create an independent state that rejected terror and recognized Israel’s right to exist. There were many details to negotiate, but the concept was one I could support.

  The evening of the Arab League summit, a Hamas suicide bomber walked into a hotel dining room filled with people celebrating Passover in the Israeli city of Netanya. “Suddenly it was hell,” one guest said. “There was the smell of smoke and dust in my mouth and a ringing in my ears.” One of the bloodiest attacks of the Second Intifada, the bombing killed 30 Israelis and wounded 140.

  In response, Prime Minister Sharon ordered a sweeping Israeli offensive into the West Bank. Israeli forces quickly picked up hundreds of suspected militants and surrounded Yasser Arafat in his Ramallah office. Sharon announced he would build a security barrier separating Israeli communities from the Palestinians in the West Bank. The fence was widely condemned. I hoped it would provide the security Israelis needed to make hard choices for peace.

  I urged Sharon privately to end the offensive, which had become counterproductive. Arafat held a TV interview by candlelight and was looking like a martyr. Sharon forged ahead. I gave a Rose Garden speech publicly calling on him to begin a withdrawal. “Enough is enough,” I said. Still, Sharon wouldn’t budge.

  By the time Crown Prince Abdullah arrived at our ranch, his peace plan had been shelved. He was angered by the violence, furious with Sharon, and—I soon learned—frustrated with me.

  The crown prince is a gentle, modest, almost shy man. He speaks softly, doesn’t drink alcohol, and prays five times a day. In eight years, I never saw him without his traditional robes.

  After a brief discussion, Abdullah asked for time alone with his foreign minister and ambassador. A few minutes later, State Department interpreter Gamal Helal came to me with a stricken look on his face. “Mr. President,” he said, “I think the Saudis are getting ready to leave.”

  I was surprised. I thought the meeting had been going fine. But Gamal explained that the Saudis had expected me to persuade Sharon to withdraw from Ramallah before the crown prince arrived. Now they were insisting that I call the Israeli prime minister on the spot. I wasn’t going to conduct diplomacy that way. I sent Colin into the living room to see what was going on. He confirmed that our guests were headed for the door. America’s pivotal relationship with Saudi Arabia was about to be seriously ruptured.

  I walked into the living room with Gamal and asked for a moment alone with the crown prince. I had read two interesting things about him in a background briefing. One was that he was a devout religious believer. The other was that he loved his farm.

  “Your Royal Highness,” I said. “I would like to discuss religion with you.” I talked about my belief in Christianity and the role religion played in my life. I hoped he would reciprocate by talking about his faith. He wasn’t in a sharing mood.

  In a last-gasp effort, I said, “Before you leave, may I show you my ranch?” He nodded. A few minutes later, the crown prince, flowing robes and all, was climbing into a Ford F-250 pickup. Then he, Gamal, and I took off for a tour of the property. I pointed out the different kinds of hardwood trees, the native prairie grasses that Laura had planted, and the grazing cattle. The crown prince sat silently. I wasn’t making much headway.

  What began as a tense ride around the ranch with the Crown Prince. White House/Eric Draper

  Then we reached a remote part of the property. A lone hen turkey was standing in the road. I stopped the truck. The bird stayed put.

  “What is that?” the crown prince asked.

  I told him it was a turkey. “Benjamin Franklin loved the turkey so much he wanted it to be America’s national bird,” I said.

  Suddenly I felt the crown prince’s hand grab my arm. “My brother,” he said, “it is a sign from Allah. This is a good omen.”

  I’ve never fully understood the significance of the bird, but I felt the tension begin to melt. When we got back to the house, our aides were surprised to hear us say we were ready for lunc
h. The next day, I got a call from Mother and Dad. The crown prince had stopped in Houston to visit them. Mother said he had tears in his eyes as he recounted his time in Crawford and talked about what we could achieve together. For the rest of my presidency, my relationship with the crown prince—soon to be king—was extremely close. I had never seen a hen turkey on that part of the property before, and I haven’t seen one since.

  As I thought more about the turmoil in the Middle East, I concluded that the fundamental problem was the lack of freedom in the Palestinian Territories. With no state, Palestinians lacked their rightful place in the world. With no voice in their future, Palestinians were ripe for recruiting by extremists. And with no legitimately elected Palestinian leader committed to fighting terror, the Israelis had no reliable partner for peace. I believed the solution was a democratic Palestinian state, led by elected officials who would answer to their people, reject terror, and pursue peace with Israel.

  As violence in the Holy Land escalated in the spring of 2002, I decided we needed a game-changer. I planned to outline my commitment to a Palestinian democracy with a major speech in the Rose Garden. I would be the first president to publicly call for a Palestinian state as a matter of policy. I hoped setting forward a bold vision would help both sides make the hard choices necessary for peace.

  The idea sparked controversy, starting in my administration. While Condi and Steve Hadley supported it, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell all told me I shouldn’t give the speech. Dick and Don were concerned that supporting a Palestinian state in the midst of an intifada would look like rewarding terrorism. Colin worried that calling for new Palestinian leadership would embarrass Arafat and reduce the chance for a negotiated settlement.